SoroushVahidi/scidocs huggingface dataset:
CCDN: Content-Centric Data Center Networks
(2016)

Data center networks continually seek higher network performance to meet the ever increasing application demand. Recently, researchers are exploring the method to enhance the data center network performance by intelligent caching and increasing the access points for hot data chunks. Motivated by this, we come up with a simple yet useful caching mechanism for generic data centers, i.e., a server caches a data chunk after an application on it reads the chunk from the file system, and then uses the cached chunk to serve subsequent chunk requests from nearby servers. To turn the basic idea above into a practical system and address the challenges behind it, we design content-centric data center networks CCDNs, which exploits an innovative combination of content-based forwarding and location [Internet Protocol IP]-based forwarding in switches, to correctly locate the target server for a data chunk on a fully distributed basis. Furthermore, CCDN enhances traditional content-based forwarding to determine the nearest target server, and enhances traditional location IP-based forwarding to make high utilization of the precious memory space in switches. Extensive simulations based on real-world workloads and experiments on a test bed built with NetFPGA prototypes show that, even with a small portion of the server’s storage as cache e.g., 3% and with a modest content forwarding information base size e.g., 1000 entries in switches, CCDN can improve the average throughput to get data chunks by 43% compared with a pure Hadoop File System HDFS system in a real data center.
Distillation as a Defense to Adversarial Perturbations Against Deep Neural Networks
(2016)

Deep learning algorithms have been shown to perform extremely well on many classical machine learning problems. However, recent studies have shown that deep learning, like other machine learning techniques, is vulnerable to adversarial samples: inputs crafted to force a deep neural network (DNN) to provide adversary-selected outputs. Such attacks can seriously undermine the security of the system supported by the DNN, sometimes with devastating consequences. For example, autonomous vehicles can be crashed, illicit or illegal content can bypass content filters, or biometric authentication systems can be manipulated to allow improper access. In this work, we introduce a defensive mechanism called defensive distillation to reduce the effectiveness of adversarial samples on DNNs. We analytically investigate the generalizability and robustness properties granted by the use of defensive distillation when training DNNs. We also empirically study the effectiveness of our defense mechanisms on two DNNs placed in adversarial settings. The study shows that defensive distillation can reduce effectiveness of sample creation from 95% to less than 0.5% on a studied DNN. Such dramatic gains can be explained by the fact that distillation leads gradients used in adversarial sample creation to be reduced by a factor of 1030. We also find that distillation increases the average minimum number of features that need to be modified to create adversarial samples by about 800% on one of the DNNs we tested.
The Limitations of Deep Learning in Adversarial Settings
(2016)

Deep learning takes advantage of large datasets and computationally efficient training algorithms to outperform other approaches at various machine learning tasks. However, imperfections in the training phase of deep neural networks make them vulnerable to adversarial samples: inputs crafted by adversaries with the intent of causing deep neural networks to misclassify. In this work, we formalize the space of adversaries against deep neural networks (DNNs) and introduce a novel class of algorithms to craft adversarial samples based on a precise understanding of the mapping between inputs and outputs of DNNs. In an application to computer vision, we show that our algorithms can reliably produce samples correctly classified by human subjects but misclassified in specific targets by a DNN with a 97% adversarial success rate while only modifying on average 4.02% of the input features per sample. We then evaluate the vulnerability of different sample classes to adversarial perturbations by defining a hardness measure. Finally, we describe preliminary work outlining defenses against adversarial samples by defining a predictive measure of distance between a benign input and a target classification.
TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems
(2015)

Martı́n Abadi, Ashish Agarwal, Paul Barham, Eugene Brevdo, Zhifeng Chen, Craig Citro, Greg S. Corrado, Andy Davis, Jeffrey Dean, Matthieu Devin, Sanjay Ghemawat, Ian Goodfellow, Andrew Harp, Geoffrey Irving, Michael Isard, Yangqing Jia, Rafal Jozefowicz, Lukasz Kaiser, Manjunath Kudlur, Josh Levenberg, Dan Mané, Rajat Monga, Sherry Moore, Derek Murray, Chris Olah, Mike Schuster, Jonathon Shlens, Benoit Steiner, Ilya Sutskever, Kunal Talwar, Paul Tucker, Vincent Vanhoucke, Vijay Vasudevan, Fernanda Viégas, Oriol Vinyals, Pete Warden, Martin Wattenberg, Martin Wicke, Yuan Yu, and Xiaoqiang Zheng Google Research∗ Abstract
Intriguing properties of neural networks
(2014)

Deep neural networks are highly expressive models that have recently achieved state of the art performance on speech and visual recognition tasks. While their expressiveness is the reason they succeed, it also causes them to learn uninterpretable solutions that could have counter-intuitive properties. In this paper we report two such properties. First, we find that there is no distinction between individual high level units and random linear combinations of high level units, according to various methods of unit analysis. It suggests that it is the space, rather than the individual units, that contains the semantic information in the high layers of neural networks. Second, we find that deep neural networks learn input-output mappings that are fairly discontinuous to a significant extent. We can cause the network to misclassify an image by applying a certain hardly perceptible perturbation, which is found by maximizing the network’s prediction error. In addition, the specific nature of these perturbations is not a random artifact of learning: the same perturbation can cause a different network, that was trained on a different subset of the dataset, to misclassify the same input.
Millimeter wave cavity backed aperture coupled microstrip patch antenna
(2016)

In this paper, a new single element broad band cavity backed multi-layer microstrip patch antenna is presented. This antenna is designed to be used in 79 GHz MIMO radar applications, and is fabricated with advanced high resolution multi-layer PCB technology. It has a wide bandwidth of 11.43 GHz, which is 14.5% of the center frequency. The beam widths in both E and H-planes are very wide, and are 144 degrees and 80 degrees respectively. Also, the antenna gain and efficiency are respectively 4.7 dB and 87%. Furthermore, measurements have been done, and show a good agreement with simulations.
ROBUST CYLINDER FITTING IN THREE-DIMENSIONAL POINT CLOUD DATA
(2017)

This paper investigates the problems of cylinder fitting in laser scanning three-dimensional Point Cloud Data (PCD). Most existing methods require full cylinder data, do not study the presence of outliers, and are not statistically robust. But especially mobile laser scanning often has incomplete data, as street poles for example are only scanned from the road. Moreover, existence of outliers is common. Outliers may occur as random or systematic errors, and may be scattered and/or clustered. In this paper, we present a statistically robust cylinder fitting algorithm for PCD that combines Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) with robust regression. Robust principal components as obtained by RPCA allow estimating cylinder directions more accurately, and an existing efficient circle fitting algorithm following robust regression principles, properly fit cylinder. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method on artificial and real PCD. Results show that the proposed method provides more accurate and robust results: (i) in the presence of noise and high percentage of outliers, (ii) for incomplete as well as complete data, (iii) for small and large number of points, and (iv) for different sizes of radius. On 1000 simulated quarter cylinders of 1m radius with 10% outliers a PCA based method fit cylinders with a radius of on average 3.63meter (m); the proposed method on the other hand fit cylinders of on average 1.02 m radius. The algorithm has potential in applications such as fitting cylindrical (e.g., light and traffic) poles, diameter at breast height estimation for trees, and building and bridge information modelling.
Feature integration analysis of bag-of-features model for image retrieval
(2013)

One of the biggest challenges in content based image retrieval is to solve the problem of “semantic gaps” between low-level features and high-level semantic concepts. In this paper, we aim to investigate various combinations of mid-level features to build an effective image retrieval system based on the bag-offeatures (BoF) model. Specifically, we study two ways of integrating the SIFT and LBP descriptors, HOG and LBP descriptors, respectively. Based on the qualitative and quantitative evaluations on two benchmark datasets, we show that the integrations of these features yield complementary and substantial improvement on image retrieval even with noisy background and ambiguous objects. Two integration models are proposed: the patch-based integration and image-based integration. By using a weighted K-means clustering algorithm, the image-based SIFT-LBP integration achieves the best performance on the given benchmark problems comparing to the existing algorithms. & 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Optimizing Space Amplification in RocksDB
(2017)

RocksDB is an embedded, high-performance, persistent keyvalue storage engine developed at Facebook. Much of our current focus in developing and configuring RocksDB is to give priority to resource efficiency instead of giving priority to the more standard performance metrics, such as response time latency and throughput, as long as the latter remain acceptable. In particular, we optimize space efficiency while ensuring read and write latencies meet service-level requirements for the intended workloads. This choice is motivated by the fact that storage space is most often the primary bottleneck when using Flash SSDs under typical production workloads at Facebook. RocksDB uses log-structured merge trees to obtain significant space efficiency and better write throughput while achieving acceptable read performance. This paper describes methods we used to reduce storage usage in RocksDB. We discuss how we are able to trade off storage efficiency and CPU overhead, as well as read and write amplification. Based on experimental evaluations of MySQL with RocksDB as the embedded storage engine (using TPC-C and LinkBench benchmarks) and based on measurements taken from production databases, we show that RocksDB uses less than half the storage that InnoDB uses, yet performs well and in many cases even better than the B-tree-based InnoDB storage engine. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a Log-structured merge treebased storage engine has shown competitive performance when running OLTP workloads at large scale.
Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency 5 G Communication
(2016)

Machine-to-machine communication, M2M, will make up a large portion of the new types of services and use cases that the fifth generation (5G) systems will address. On the one hand, 5G will connect a large number of low-cost and low-energy devices in the context of the Internet of things; on the other hand it will enable critical machine type communication use cases, such as smart factory, automotive, energy, and e-health – which require communication with very high reliability and availability, as well as very low end-to-end latency. In this paper, we will discuss the requirements, enablers and challenges to support these emerging mission-critical 5G use cases. Keywords— 5G, NR, M2M, MTC, URLLC, Tactile Internet, Reliability, Latency.
A GLOBAL MEASURE OF PERCEIVED STRESS
(2012)

Aim: To evaluate validity of the Greek version of a global measure of perceived stress PSS−14 (Perceived Stress Scale – 14 item). Materials and Methods: The original PSS−14 (theoretical range 0−56) was translated into Greek and then back-translated. One hundred men and women (39±10 years old, 40 men) participated in the validation process. Firstly, participants completed the Greek PSS−14 and, then they were interviewed by a psychologist specializing in stress management. Cronbach’s alpha (α) evaluated internal consistency of the measurement, whereas Kendall’s tau-b and Bland & Altman methods assessed consistency with the clinical evaluation. Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor analyses were conducted to reveal hidden factors within the data and to confirm the two-dimensional character of the scale. Results: Mean (SD) PSS−14 score was 25(7.9). Strong internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.847) as well as moderate-to-good concordance between clinical assessment and PSS−14 (Kendall’s tau-b = 0.43, p<0.01) were observed. Two factors were extracted. Factor one explained 34.7% of variability and was heavily laden by positive items, and factor two that explained 10.6% of the variability by negative items. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the model with 2 factors had chi-square equal to 241.23 (p<0.001), absolute fix indexes were good (i.e. GFI=0.733, AGFI=0.529), and incremental fix indexes were also adequate (i.e. NFI=0.89 and CFI=0.92). Conclusion: The developed Greek version of PSS−14 seems to be a valid instrument for the assessment of perceived stress in the Greek adult population living in urban areas; a finding that supports its local use in research settings as an evaluation tool measuring perceived stress, mainly as a risk factor but without diagnostic properties.
Polysemy: Theoretical and Computational Approaches Yael Ravin and Claudia Leacock (editors) (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and Educational Testing Services) New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, xi+227 pp; hardbound, ISBN 0-19-823842-8, $74.00, £45.00; paperbound, ISBN 0-19-925086-3, $21.95, £
(2002)

As the editors of this volume remind us, polysemy has been a vexing issue for the understanding of language since antiquity. For half a century, it has been a major bottleneck for natural language processing. It contributed to the failure of early machine translation research (remember Bar-Hillel’s famous pen and box example) and is still plaguing most natural language processing and information retrieval applications. A recent issue of this journal described the state of the art in automatic sense disambiguation (Ide and Véronis 1998), and Senseval system competitions have revealed the immense difficulty of the task (http://www.sle.sharp.co.uk/senseval2). However, no significant progress can be made on the computational aspects of polysemy without serious advances in theoretical issues. At the same time, theoretical work can be fostered by computational results and problems, and language-processing applications can provide a unique test bed for theories. It was therefore an excellent idea to gather both theoretical and applied contributions in the same book. Yael Ravin and Claudia Leacock are well-known names to those who work on the theoretical and computational aspects of word meaning. In this volume, they bring together a collection of essays from leading researchers in the field. As far as I can tell, these essays are not reprints or expanded versions of conference papers, as is often the case for edited works; instead, they seem to have been specially commissioned for the purposes of this book, which makes it even more exciting to examine. The book is composed of 11 chapters. It is not formally divided into parts, but chapters dealing more specifically with the computational aspects of polysemy are grouped together at the end (and constitute about one-third of the volume). Chapter 1 is an overview written by the volume editors. Yael Ravin and Claudia Leacock survey the main theories of meaning and their treatment of polysemy. These include the classical Aristotelian approach revived by Katz and Fodor (1963); Rosch’s (1977) prototypical approach, which has its roots in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953); and the relational approach recently exemplified by WordNet (Fellbaum 1998), which (although the authors do not mention it) can be traced back to Peirce’s (1931–1958) and Selz’s (1913, 1922) graphs and which gained popularity with Quillian’s (1968) semantic networks. In the course of this overview, Ravin and Leacock put the individual chapters into perspective by relating them to the various theories.
Effects of a Dynamic Warm-Up, Static Stretching or Static Stretching with Tendon Vibration on Vertical Jump Performance and EMG Responses
(2013)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the short-term effects of static stretching, with vibration given directly over Achilles tendon, on electro-myographic (EMG) responses and vertical jump (VJ) performances. Fifteen male, college athletes voluntarily participated in this study (n=15; age: 22±4 years old; body height: 181±10 cm; body mass: 74±11 kg). All stages were completed within 90 minutes for each participant. Tendon vibration bouts lasted 30 seconds at 50 Hz for each volunteer. EMG analysis for peripheral silent period, H-reflex, H-reflex threshold, T-reflex and H/M ratio were completed for each experimental phases. EMG data were obtained from the soleus muscle in response to electro stimulation on the popliteal post tibial nerve. As expected, the dynamic warm-up (DW) increased VJ performances (p=0.004). Increased VJ performances after the DW were not statistically substantiated by the EMG findings. In addition, EMG results did not indicate that either static stretching (SS) or tendon vibration combined with static stretching (TVSS) had any detrimental or facilitation effect on vertical jump performances. In conclusion, using TVSS does not seem to facilitate warm-up effects before explosive performance.
Relation between language experiences in preschool classrooms and children's kindergarten and fourth-grade language and reading abilities.
(2011)

Indirect effects of preschool classroom indexes of teacher talk were tested on fourth-grade outcomes for 57 students from low-income families in a longitudinal study of classroom and home influences on reading. Detailed observations and audiotaped teacher and child language data were coded to measure content and quantity of verbal interactions in preschool classrooms. Preschool teachers' use of sophisticated vocabulary during free play predicted fourth-grade reading comprehension and word recognition (mean age=9; 7), with effects mediated by kindergarten child language measures (mean age=5; 6). In large group preschool settings, teachers' attention-getting utterances were directly related to later comprehension. Preschool teachers' correcting utterances and analytic talk about books, and early support in the home for literacy predicted fourth-grade vocabulary, as mediated by kindergarten receptive vocabulary.
Static secure page allocation for light-weight dynamic information flow tracking
(2012)

Dynamic information flow tracking (DIFT) is an effective security countermeasure for both low-level memory corruptions and high-level semantic attacks. However, many software approaches suffer large performance degradation, and hardware approaches have high logic and storage overhead. We propose a flexible and light-weight hardware/software co-design approach to perform DIFT based on secure page allocation. Instead of associating every data with a taint tag, we aggregate data according to their taints, i.e., putting data with different attributes in separate memory pages. Our approach is a compiler-aided process with architecture support. The implementation and analysis show that the memory overhead is little, and our approach can protect critical information, including return address, indirect jump address, and system call IDs, from being overwritten by malicious users.
A concept for automated construction progress monitoring using BIM-based geometric constraints and photogrammetric point clouds
(2015)

On-site progress monitoring is essential for keeping track of the ongoing work on construction sites. Currently, this task is a manual, time-consuming activity. The research presented here, describes a concept for an automated comparison of the actual state of construction with the planned state for the early detection of deviations in the construction process. The actual state of the construction site is detected by photogrammetric surveys. From these recordings, dense point clouds are generated by the fusion of disparity maps created with semi-global-matching (SGM). These are matched against the target state provided by a 4D Building Information Model (BIM). For matching the point cloud and the BIM, the distances between individual points of the cloud and a component’s surface are aggregated using a regular cell grid. For each cell, the degree of coverage is determined. Based on this, a confidence value is computed which serves as basis for the existence decision concerning the respective component. Additionally, processand dependency-relations are included to further enhance the detection process. Experimental results from a real-world case study are presented and discussed.
Evolutionary computation and evolutionary deep learning for image analysis, signal processing and pattern recognition
(2018)

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). GECCO ’18 Companion, July 15--19, 2018, Kyoto, Japan © 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). 978-1-4503-57647/18/07...$15.00 DOI https://doi.org/10.1145/3205651.3207859
Serotonin alterations in anorexia and bulimia nervosa: New insights from imaging studies
(2005)

Anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) are related disorders with relatively homogenous presentations such as age of onset and gender distribution. In addition, they share symptoms, such as extremes of food consumption, body image distortion, anxiety and obsessions, and ego-syntonic neglect, raises the possibility that these symptoms reflect disturbed brain function that contributes to the pathophysiology of this illness. Recent brain imaging studies have identified altered activity in frontal, cingulate, temporal, and parietal cortical regions in AN and BN. Importantly, such disturbances are present when subjects are ill and persist after recovery, suggesting that these may be traits that are independent of the state of the illness. Emerging data point to a dysregulation of serotonin pathways in cortical and limbic structures that may be related to anxiety, behavioral inhibition, and body image distortions. In specific, recent studies using PET with serotonin specific radioligands implicate alterations of 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A receptors and the 5-HT transporter. Alterations of these circuits may affect mood and impulse control as well as the motivating and hedonic aspects of feeding behavior. Such imaging studies may offer insights into new pharmacology and psychotherapy approaches.